Does Scott Brown have Mass?

The Massachusetts senator is a Republican in a Democratic state. It will take some fancy politicking for him to hold in 2012

Then Republican candidate Scott Brown voting in Massachusetts in January 2010; with a late surge, in which he made the election in part a referendum on Obama's healthcare bill, he beat Democratic candidate Martha Coakley in the race for the late Edward Kennedy’s Senate seat. Photograph: Robert F Bukaty/AP AP

During his 1996 reelection campaign, Congressman Peter Blute ran a clever ad. The two-term Massachusetts Republican sat at a table between pictures of President Bill Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich, using the props to demonstrate his independence. When the Democrats wanted to raise taxes, Blute voted with Gingrich, he explained as he pulled the speaker's mug toward him. But when Gingrich proposed radical spending cuts, Blute told viewers he voted with Clinton and reached for the president's photo.

Blute's Democratic challenger, Jim McGovern, had an equally clever ad with a simpler message: "You wouldn't vote for Newt. Why would you vote for Blute?"

Blute lost his House seat that November. McGovern is still in Congress today.

Massachusetts didn't send another Republican to Washington until Scott Brown won a special election to fill the remainder of the late Ted Kennedy's Senate term, last January. Brown is up for re-election in 2012 and will seek to avoid Blute's fate. Backed by a coalition of Tea Party conservatives, who wanted a reliable vote against the Obama administration, and independents, who hoped he wouldn't be a rubberstamp Republican, he may find that splitting the difference between two parties is as hard as serving two masters.

Brown has sided with President Obama on some issues and the Republican leadership on others. In the lame-duck session of Congress, Brown reversed himself and became one of just eight Senate Republicans to vote to repeal the "Don't ask, don't tell" policy on gay soldiers in the US military. The senator came to back repeal due to lobbying, and out of deference to the majority sentiment among his constituents.

Yet, Brown joined most Republicans in voting to block the Dream Act, spurning entreaties from immigrant activists and Massachusetts university leaders.

Brown supported the tax cut compromise that divided the Tea Party movement itself. Conservatives almost unanimously favoured retaining the Bush-era tax rates, rather than letting them expire. But many preferred a more permanent tax cut without the accompanying spending increases, rather than the deal's temporary tax cut extension sweetened with more deficit spending.

Yet, Brown did agree with Republican leaders that the tax cuts must be continued for upper-income earners. Liberal groups took out television commercials pillorying the senator, who had campaigned against bailouts, for voting against a package of middle-class tax cuts that didn't include those making $250,000 and up. Then, Brown riled some conservative activists by supporting the Obama administration on the new Start treaty.

Brown, whose election shook the political landscape to the extent that he was once talked about as a presidential contender, will be a top Democratic target in the 2012 election cycle. Although he is in the unusual position of representing a liberal state, Brown faces the same dilemma as many other Republicans: he must hold together a group of independent and conservative voters who, at the 2010 midterms, agreed on little besides their contempt for a once disproportionately Democratic batch of incumbents.

Like Blute before him, Brown will try to offer each group of voters enough to keep them in his camp. The risk is that the independents may not find him independent enough, while his conservative base may regard him as a "Republican in name only" ("Rino"). Conservatives were in Rino-hunting mood in 2010, even when it put GOP congressional seats at risk.

Rinos could be an endangered species even in Massachusetts. "I think that there will be a primary challenge," Christen Varley, president of the Greater Boston Tea party, told the Boston Globe. "There's enough of an underground movement in the Tea Party movement as seeing him as not being conservative enough. There probably will be multiple people who attempt to run against him." No names have emerged yet, however.

Scott Brown knows what he is doing, and polls show he is still the frontrunner. He is the rare Republican who has managed to win 10 elections in Massachusetts. But going into 1996, Peter Blute had never lost a Bay State election before either – until he was tied to the national Republican leadership. And Ted Kennedy's successor is sure to attract a challenger who runs on same variation of this slogan: "Boston ain't Mitch McConnell's town. Why vote for Scott Brown?"